Homestead_11 – Connecting to Ethereum Clients

Connecting to Ethereum Clients

Ethereum clients expose a number of methods over JSON-RPC for interacting with them from within an application. However, interacting directly over JSON-RPC passes on a number of burdens to the application developers, such as:

JSON-RPC protocol implementation

Binary format encoding/decoding for creating and interacting with smart contracts

A number of libraries have been written to help address these issues, allowing application developers to focus on their applications, instead of the underlying plumbing to interact with Ethereum clients and the wider ecosystem.

web3.js

web3.js

This is the Ethereum compatible JavaScript API which implements the Generic JSON RPC spec. It’s available on npm as a node module, for bower and component as an embeddable js and as a meteor.js package.

ethereum-ruby

ethereum-ruby is a pure-Ruby JSON-RPC wrapper for communicating with an Ethereum node. To use this library you will need to have a running Ethereum node with IPC support enabled (default). Currently, the go-ethereum client is supported.